Dr. Elvira Poloczanska – CSI Fellow

Dr. Elvira Poloczanska is an ecologist and ecological population modeler with interests in intertidal and shallow coastal systems (as of February 2009). She is currently a research fellow at CSIRO, Marine and Atmospheric Research, Australia under Wealth from Oceans National Flagship Programme. She plans to undertake research which aims to improve understanding of climatic variability and impacts of climate change for Australian marine ecosystems. Dr. Poloczanska earned her PhD in 2001 and her B.S. in 1996 in Aquatic Bioscience, both at the University of Glasgow. Dr. Poloczanska’s PhD work on sandeels (forage fish) included a multi-disciplinary study which covered developing and testing of age-structured population models and applied fisheries science. Ecological modelling is a major part of her research and is designed to make predictions of the consequences of individual behaviour and competitive interactions for populations and communities. Dr Poloczanska also was involved a major four-year multi-partner British and Irish project, Marine Biodiversity and Climate Change (MarClim) led by the Marine Biological Association in collaboration with Plymouth Marine Laboratory, The Scottish Association for Marine Science, The University of Plymouth and University College Cork. The aim of MarClim is to assess and forecast the influence of climatic change on marine biodiversity in Britain and Ireland using long term and current data on intertidal rocky shore indicator species. Her role in this project was to participate in resurveys of sites from the west coast of Scotland and produce climate envelope models to predict potential future species distributions under different climate change scenarios. Dr. Poloczanska is current research in climate change and climatic variability includes climate driven interactions, biogeographic modelling, and implications for conservation management.